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106 Part II: Realising That Character Is Everything
You don’t need to put everything you discover about your characters into your
final story. But the more you know about them, the more real they seem to
your readers. In addition, nobody’s 100 per cent good or bad. Everyone’s a mixture,
and your characters need to be too – so don’t forget to give them flaws
and foibles as well as hidden strengths.
Adding Layers to Your Characters
With this heading, I’m not talking about dressing up your characters in
warm clothes (like a concerned grandma!). No, the focus of this section is on
psychological layers.
Everyone knows that people present only certain aspects of themselves in
public. The rest, they hide away. Some parts are so well hidden that they’re
repressed and remain unknown even to the individual. One of your tasks as a
writer is to reveal these hidden depths to readers.
To help with this aim, I describe creating characters with depth by considering
their basic needs and pastimes as well as relationships with family and friends.
I also show the value of subtly revealing character through contradictions.
Revealing depth through experiences
Although people may think that they know themselves well, in fact they
seldom do. Like everyone, you’re aware of how you’re likely to think and
feel in the ordinary circumstances that make up your day-to-day life, but
you don’t know how you’ll react if something completely out of the ordinary
happens.
For example, how do you think you’d behave if an aeroplane you were on
crash-landed on a mountain top? Sorry to put you off your dinner, but would
you set off down the mountain and hack through the jungle to a small village
to get help? Would you curl up in the snow and wait to die? Would you eat
the dead passengers in order to survive? And would you even be prepared to
kill injured passengers in order to eat them? If I’m completely honest, I don’t
have a clue how I’d react, and I hope I never have to find out!
Such nightmarish crises are the stuff of fiction. You don’t need a situation as
extreme as this one to test your characters out, but every piece of fiction gives
your characters a challenge or a choice, and their responses reveal who they
really are.